Apple Brings Nehalem Xeon CPU, SSD To New Xserve

Apple's newest Mac Pro was the first machine on the planet to ship with Intel's Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series processors, and now those very chips have made their way over to the company's line of rack-mount servers. The long standing Xserve line has been updated today with "twice the performance" of prior models, bringing with them Intel's most powerful Xeon CPUs yet.

The 1U server is available with up to two 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon processors, and potentially more interesting is the availability of SSD drives for the first time ever in the Xserve line. In fact, even the new Mac Pro can't be ordered with an SSD within. Apple allows prospective buyers to select up to 3TB of internal storage, a 128GB primary SSD, between 3GB and 24GB of 1066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, up to two Dual-channel Gigabit Ethernet / 4Gb Fibre Channel cards, single or dual 750-watt power supplies and Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard (unlimited client license).

Furthermore, Apple promises that by using high-efficiency power supplies and intelligent thermal management, the new Xserve delivers a 19 percent reduction in idle power use. For those paranoid about data security, there's also a bundled 72-hour backup battery. The base configuration ($2,999) is listed below along with a rundown of the mighty expensive build-to-order options.

The Xserve standard configuration, with a suggested retail price of $2,999 (US), includes:

a single 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Xeon 5500 series processor with 8MB of fully shared L3 cache;